Workshop participants to be deported for visa violation
Workshop participants to be deported for visa violation
Apriadi Gunawan, The Jakarta Post/Medan
After seven hours of questioning, four foreigners participating
in a trauma counseling workshop in Medan will soon be deported
for visa violations. Syarief O. Ahimsa, the chief of Medan
Polonia Immigration Office, said on Friday that they would be
deported on Saturday through Polonia Airport.
The four ill-fated foreigners are Dabhidiwala Meryam,
Mitraraja Kanti, both Indian nationals, Setungga Mudalige Philip,
a Sri Lankan national and Dauncey Rebecca Fay, a British
national.
Dabhidiwala and Setungga attended the workshop in their
capacity as representatives of the Asian Human Rights Commission,
Mitraraja is a trauma expert invited by the workshop's organizer
the North Sumatra Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of
Violence (Kontras) and Dauncey is a relief worker who has been
living in Aceh for a long time. Dauncey was a workshop
participant.
According to Syarief, the four had violated an immigration law
as they only held a tourist visa.
As holders of a tourist visa, the four should not have
attended a workshop on trauma counseling for tsunami victims, but
they had violated the visa use, said Syarief.
"If they had wished to attend a seminar, they should have used
a seminar visa that would allow them to attend the seminar," said
Syarief. "They have to leave the country by Saturday, and if they
do not, then they will be forcibly deported," said Syarief.
According to Syarief, besides the visa violation, the four
were to be deported on suspicions that they were involved or had
contact with members of the rebel Free Aceh Movement (GAM).
"We received information that they had connection with GAM
from the Indonesian Military intelligence," said Syarief.
The intelligence information was also the basis for the police
to raid the workshop on Thursday and for calling it off. The
workshop, held in Sumatra Village, Medan, was actually set to
wind down on Saturday.
North Sumatra Kontras' Chief of Internal Affairs, Wina
Khairina, expressed concern over the deportation. Earlier,
similar thoughts were aired by another activist Otto Syamsuddin
Ishak, who said that the action reminded him of the time of
Soeharto's New Order dictatorship when people were not free to
gather and express their views.
During an interview on Friday, Wina also refuted charges that
some participants had links with GAM. She asserted that all
participants were concerned with trauma rehabilitation in the
post-tsunami disaster in Aceh.
She confirmed that some of the 24 participants were Acehnese
but none of them had links with GAM.
The incident began on Thursday when police personnel raided
the workshop and later held the four foreigners. A senior police
officer earlier argued that the raid was held because the
workshop committee had not reported the planned workshop to the
police.
Similar raids were common during iron-fist regime of Soeharto,
but have rarely happened after the reform movement that took
place in 1998. The reform movement was marked by several laws
that assured freedom of expression. The law says, among other
things, that people are free to gather as long as they report the
gathering to the police.